Estonians will say they wonder why the heck it takes a Finn twice as long as an Estonian to say the same thing.
Also, I'm not sure if it's a thing in Estonian, but I've heard in Lithuania or Latvian there's no distinction between spoken and written language.
Example from Finnish:
* Minä means I/me in written Finnish
* Mä/Mää/Mie/... is what people typically use in spoken language
Which is what some of my international friends have been complaining about the Finnish courses at my university -- that they learn the written Finnish from their 101 books, but it's not so useful since in daily interactions people just use spoken Finnish.
And well maybe the minä -> mä you can see the length difference. Maybe Estonian is just more advanced in the "spoken-ness", if you will, of the language.
Here you can see the different "minä"s by region in Finland: https://yle.fi/a/74-20010020. The article's in Finnish, but just scroll down and you can still very much understand the map.
Here's the article Google-translated to English, but I'm not sure if it would also translate the "minä"s: https://yle-fi.translate.goog/a/74-20010020?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x...
Minä -> mä is Mina -> Ma (meaning "me")
Meie -> Me (meaning "us")
Tema -> ta (meaning "him/her")
I once did a duolingo course on Finnish and was surprised to find how much of it is almost literally the same, both in having almost the same amount of cases (we have 14, Finnish has 15), and that the overall structure is the same, meaning the biggest hurdle for me to learn Finnish is not so much the langauge, but the vocabulary. While a lot of Finnish words are almost identical in Estonian, there's also quite a few that actually mean things in Estonian, but totally different things than in Finnish.
A funny (or not funny?) example is "Raiska pappi", which in Estonian means "Spend/waste money", but in Finnish means "raping priest" or something like that.
